Close you Apertures !!!

PerroneFord said:
To get even REMOTELY close to a Zeiss prime at T2 or T2.8 with common Nikon Glass, you're running wide open. There is a reason their glass costs what it does. Our glass can't compete for sharpness. .
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How does a Nikon wide open come close to a Zeiss bet 2 / 2.8? You got me on this one. Do you mean DOF or sharpness? Zeiss ZF's and Nikon 2.8 Zooms definitely compete in terms of sharpness with PL mount primes. The reason they cost so much more has more to do with the housing, mechanics and small specialized market than the optics.
 
Pmark, the stock HVX lens is quite soft used wide open...you want to try and keep f4 dialed in on your HVX where possible. We've got a very nice trailer coming (Undertow) that recently won the "People's Choice Award" at its first festival showing. It was shot with three Lomo cinema lenses (28, 50, 85) and an HVX200 which the DP refused to use at less than f4. He was militant about focus, collimation and adjusting back-focus with temperature. I think we were all shocked to see how stunning the footage looked projected on a 25" screen :-)
 
I've been comparing tons and tons of footage Film vs. HD w/ 35mm adapter
and its become very easy to see that problem.

Can anyone show me what they think is the best 35mm footage you've seen
 
NathanPresley said:
I've been comparing tons and tons of footage Film vs. HD w/ 35mm adapter
and its become very easy to see that problem.

Can anyone show me what they think is the best 35mm footage you've seen
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What are you talking about? Soft focus issues? They come from lack of experience. And, if you've got an HD Television of size you'll see that soft focus issues happen a LOT in big budget films. Harold and Kumar 2? I think the AC was smokin' while pullin'.

I think I'm just misunderstanding what you're talking about, though.
 
It seems to me that softness might be deliberately added to many 35mm features (or you could say sharpness reduced). On my HD LCD projector (image size is about 11' diagonal), once in a while I'll see a Blu-ray or HDDVD film that is almost *painfully* sharp...to the point of distraction (and I'm not talking about edge enhancement, which I also see from time to time, and which looks *really* awful). It starts to make sense to me then that filmmakers might want sometimes to soften it down a bit.

I doubt HVX footage, with or without an adapter, would need that, but it does even the playing field a little to know (or at least theorize) that a meticulously focused 35mm film camera may have more sharpness than is wanted in some cases.

Two of the movies I recall that illustrate the hyper-sharpness when projected I'm referring to are "The Tailor Of Panama" (Pierce Brosnan) and "Identity" (Ray Liotta). The TV series 24 is also often hyper-sharp. I think it's notable that all of these are fairly 'straight' shoots post-wise - little or no compositing etc. was used, where the some of the extra sharpness might have been lost in the process as an unavoidable consequence.
 
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